Why do people not punish useless status-seeking behavior? People rightly respond warmly to productive status-enhancing behavior, such as including people in conversation, fishing out common interests, and telling entertaining stories. But people also frequently reward outright bragging, cocky attitudes, and social aggressiveness - which to me are obviously done with status in mind, have no value to anyone else, and are pretty uncorrelated with the productive kinds of status behavior.
Since status is zero sum, why aren't other people more proactive in noticing, being annoyed by, and socially punishing such behavior? Are people not consciously aware of these types of behavior, which can be trained to be more or less automatic? Do they assume that swaggerers might have social clout to match their personalities and are afraid of having them as enemies?
Since status is zero sum, why aren't other people more proactive in noticing, being annoyed by, and socially punishing such behavior?
Prisoner's dilemma/tragedy of the commons. Deflating X's status seeking benefits everyone (except X and his allies), but the costs of doing so are born by the person doing the deflating.
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?